Two Doors Down
Ortiz
Maribel doesn’t answer me. She stands on Torque’s step with a bottle of water in one hand and that bag crushed against her stomach, and she looks at me. She doesn’t have to say anything. I know.
I knew in the headlight. I told myself I didn’t. A woman on the step at closing with blood on her feet isn’t a thing I let myself know before I’m off the bike. Then the helmet came off. She had the same eyes, and my whole chest went tight. Nobody else on earth gets that word out of me.
The last time I saw her she was seven years old, sitting on a step with a feather in her fist. One I gave her. I was ten. I told her I wouldn’t forget her. I meant it the way a ten-year-old means things.
Then my father took me across the water, and I never once thought I’d see her face again. I stopped letting myself think about it a long time ago. That was easier than the other thing.
The thing where she ends up bloody from another man’s cruelty.
Torque has been watching me since I put my boots down. “You know her.”
“Yeah.”
“She walked here. Los Muertos.”
I already heard him on the phone. Hearing it again with her in front of me is different. I look at her feet. The gravel is black under them.
I look at the side of her head where the hair is stuck flat. I look at how hard she’s holding that bag. My hand closes up and drops. Rage starts to boil. Torque sees that too.
I want to pick her up. That’s the honest thing. I want to pick her up and carry her inside the way I carried her home when she fell asleep on our step. I can’t, because I don’t know what they did to her. I’m not going to be one more man who put hands on her without asking.
“Mateo,” she says.
Nobody calls me that but my father. Hearing it in her voice, I have to stand still before I can move. I go up the step. I stop where I can reach her, and yet I don’t reach.
“Doc needs to look at your feet.”
“I know.”
“He won’t touch you until you say.”
She looks past me at the door. “Will you be there.”
It isn’t a question the way she says it. It’s the first thing she’s asked me in all these years. “Yeah.”
“Then he can.”
She walks in on her own. She won’t let me take the bag. Doc has the little room off the hall ready, the bunk, the light, the case open on the chair. He kicks a stool over as we come in.
“Sit,” he tells her. “Feet up. Ortiz, hold that.”
I hold the light. She sits on the bunk with the bag in her lap and puts her feet up on the stool.
Doc looks at them for a while without saying anything, which is how I know it’s bad.
He starts cutting away what’s left of the tape.
I make myself watch. I’m the reason she was out there walking on them.
“When did you eat?” I ask her.
She has to think about it. That’s the answer.
I hand Doc the light and go down the hall to the bar. There’s half a sandwich Mess left in the cooler and a bag of chips. I bring them back and put them on the bunk beside her.
She looks at the sandwich. Then she picks it up and eats all of it with her feet in Doc’s hands and her eyes on the door. I stand where I am. I don’t say a word.
I used to split my bread with her on the curb and count her bites so she’d finish. I’m counting again before I catch myself doing it.
“You came here for me,” I say when she’s done.
“Yes.”
“From Cuba.”
“Yes.”
“Looking for me.”
“Yes.”
Doc doesn’t look up. His hands don’t stop. He’s heard all of it. He’ll never say a word about it to anyone. That’s Doc.
I’ve got nothing to say back to her. What I’ve got is the picture of her asking for me. Men who knew my name and this club said sure, we’ll take you to him. She agreed because she trusted my name. Whatever they did after that, they did it to a woman who was looking for me.
I put that somewhere I can get to later, because if I take it out now I’ll go through the wall. Right now she’s on a bunk with her feet bleeding into gauze. She’s alive. She’s here.
Torque leans in the doorway.
“She stays in the building.” He isn’t asking me. He’s telling Doc, and he’s telling her. “Upstairs. Room at the end is empty. Door locks from inside.” He looks at her. “Nobody goes through that door unless you open it. That includes him.”
She nods once.
“Mess is making up the bed.” He looks at me. “When Doc’s done.”
Doc finishes a while later. He wraps her feet and tells her to keep them up. She says she will. None of us believe her. She stands on her own and takes the bag. I go up the stairs beside her.
There’s a wall on her left and me on her right. I put myself between her and the open side without deciding to. She notices. I can tell, because she used to catch me doing it on the street, and she rolled her eyes at me the exact same way.
Hendrix’s door is open at the top. He’s leaning in it with his weight on the good leg. He takes one look at her, then at me. His mouth starts to go the way it does before he says something funny, and then it stops. He nods at her, goes back in, and shuts the door.
The room at the end is small. A bed made up tight, a chair, a window over the lot. Mess put a towel on the chair and water on the sill. She stands in the middle of it with the bag.
“Lock’s here.” I show her the bolt. Her side. “Nobody has a key.”
She looks at it. She looks at me.
“Where do you sleep?”
“Two doors down.”
“Okay.”
I go out, pulling the door shut. The bolt slides in place. Then I stand in the hall with my hand still on the wood.
Torque comes up the stairs and stops with his hand on the rail. He looks at the door, then at me.
“They’ll come asking,” he says.
“Let them.”
“Ortiz.”
I look at him. “When they come, it’s mine to answer. Not yours. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
He looks at me a second longer than he needs to. Then he goes back down. I hear him lock up. I hear Mess crack a joke and Torque not laugh. I hear Rook’s boots on the gravel out front, going around.
I don’t go two doors down. I sit against the wall across from her door with my knees up and my head back. I’ve handled every bad thing that ever came through this club with my own hands and gone to bed after. I can’t go to bed.
Nineteen years.
She’s on the other side of an inch of wood, and I can hear her not sleeping. Images flash through my brain. The time between leaving Cuba and finding me. My eyes sting. I let them.
The light in the hall goes gray.
The bolt slides back. The door opens a crack. She looks down at me on the floor with my boots still on.
“You’re sleeping out here?”
“No.”
“You’re sitting out here.”
“Yeah.”
She looks at me for a second. “Idiot,” she says, and shuts the door again.